The impact of the network on ... everything

Back in the day when I was a technical architect and actually wrote code (yes, they did let me do that once) I got into a discussion with the rest of my team about the impact of our code on performance. I was saying white-space was evil because it can unnecessarily increase the number of packets necessary to transfer data. I wanted to go through the code (mostly JavaScript and HTML output) and reduce the white-space to make application response time better.

I was eventually overruled because, well, I just couldn't make the rest of the team understand the impact of our code on the network and performance and hey, one extra packet isn't going to really make a difference, is it?

It's also important for network administrators to understand how the topology of their network - and its speeds and feeds - can have an adverse affect on a variety of tasks, not just application performance. The core of the problem in the aforementioned post was a simple uplink between two switches with a significantly lower throughput than the rest of the network. A simple uplink reduced the total throughput from an anticipated 80 MB/second to 20 MB/second. That's huge, especially when you're talking about tossing around very, very, very large files.

Now if we were talking about a WAN link I'd mention WAN optimization because, well, there isn't much you can do about throughput limitations on WAN links. But this is a LAN, and while application acceleration technology could help with application performance in a similar scenario, the right answer here is simply to increase the uplink speed, or move the database servers all to the same switch with a higher speed uplink to the core switches/routers.

The network impacts everything because it delivers everything. Its toplogy and speeds and feeds are important for everyone to understand because it impacts the performance of ... everything. While I certainly think you should consider how F5 solutions can improve the performance, reliability, and security of your applications and infrastructure, sometimes the answer really is as simple as a bad cable ... or limited uplink speeds.